Ron DeSantis and Andrew Gillum are competing in an unusually intense courtship of an important constituency in the governor’s race: Jewish voters in South Florida.

The focus on Jewish voters has been heightened for weeks — akin to the levels usually seen in presidential campaigns — and shows no signs of letting up before Election Day.

The candidates are making emotional pitches, including Democrat Gillum asserting that he might not have been born if not for a Jewish couple’s kindness to his grandparents and introducing them to Florida. Republican DeSantis has positioned himself as a truer friend to Israel and asserted that anti-Semites are close to Gillum.

Supporters of both candidates are taking the fight to social media. “Wake up Jewish Floridians. Go out and vote @RonDeSantisFL,” wrote Linda Stoch, a Republican activist and secretary of the Donald Trump club in Palm Beach County. State Rep. Jared Moskowitz, a Broward Democrat, said on Twitter that Gillum had effectively refuted the DeSantis camp’s criticism. “Next issue please, this horse is dead.”

Demographics

Jewish voters have a generations-long allegiance to the Democratic Party, dating to the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. They are an important part of the coalition of voting blocs that can produce statewide victories in Florida.

Ira Sheskin, professor of geography at the University of Miami and director of the Jewish Demography Project, said about 472,500 Jews live in South Florida and 630,000 statewide. He said 95 percent of Jewish adults are registered to vote — and vote at higher rates than the overall electorate.

The two most recent public polls show Gillum leading DeSantis by 1 percentage point. In such a tight race, a small shift away from the Democrat and toward the Republican could influence the outcome.

“If Gillum loses a chunk of the Jewish vote that’s going to make it much harder for him to win,” said Kevin Wagner, a political scientist at Florida Atlantic University. “The race is close. And so moving a few points either direction might be the difference.”

Republican efforts

DeSantis has been attempting to sow doubts about Gillum among Jewish voters. Among his complaints: that in his role as mayor of Tallahassee, he welcomed representatives of the Council on American Islamic Relations to the city, and that he is supported by the group Dream Defenders, which supports the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, an attempt to impose economic pressure on Israel.

Andrew Gillum delivered a political — and strongly personal — argument on Sunday to Jewish voters, a critically important constituency for Democrats in the closely contested race for Florida governor.

Those who suggest the Democratic nominee for governor isn’t a friend of Israel or a friend of...

"I can find anti-Semites around him,” DeSantis told reporters late last month.

Republicans have repeatedly raised comments made by 20 years ago by Chris King, whom Gillum picked as his running mate for the job of lieutenant governor. After King lost his 1998 candidacy for student government president at Harvard, he attributed the loss to coverage in the student newspaper. “I was nailed to the cross,” he said. “And most of the editorial staff that was so hard on me, the vast majority were Jewish.”

King has apologized for the remarks. He brought up the issue on Tuesday during a luncheon speech at the Greater Hollywood Chamber of Commerce. “I didn’t have an anti-Semitic bone in my body then, and I don’t now.”

State Rep. Randy Fine, the only Jewish Republican in the Florida Legislature, in an opinion column published in the South Florida Sun Sentinel and then emailed out by the state Republican Party, said “King is an anti-Semite, plain and simple.” He said that in a “Gillum-King administration these anti-Semites will have a voice.”

Ava Gluck, a Jewish Democrat from Highland Beach, is one of an unknown number of people who received the text and said it prompted her to research King’s statements. “He made one remark 20 years ago,” she said.

Gluck didn’t like the text. “It kind of made me very angry. It was propaganda-ish as far as I was concerned. I know that politics are pretty dirty these days. I would just like it to be civil.”

Sheskin said King’s statements are “certainly not a plus,” but he doesn’t think that will sway many voters. “Nobody pays much attention to the second person on the ballot anyway. And it was a long time ago,” Sheskin said. “It was statement that clearly he’s sorry for, and I just don’t see where that old statement is going to change the mind of a significant number of Jews.”

Pushing back

Democrats are concerned enough to push back, strongly, against suggestions that Gillum is any less than 100 percent supportive of the Jewish community and of Israel.

Appearing Oct. 7 at the Century Pines Jewish Center in Pembroke Pines, Gillum tailored his campaign stump speech to emphasize ties to the Jewish community dating back to his grandparents, his three trips to Israel, and the only elected official — a Jewish Tallahassee city commissioner — who was willing to endorse him during his first campaign for public office.

Gillum condemned people who “spew misinformation about me and my record.” And U.S. Rep. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Weston, and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg vouched for Gillum.

On Wednesday at the Chamber of Commerce lunch in Hollywood, King condemned “an orchestrated effort to brand both of us as somehow being anti-Semitic, or not a friend of the Jewish community, of Israel, and of all of the folks and synagogues and places where we have been these last two years. That is patently untrue.” Video of the speech shows he received extensive applause from the audience of 200.

“To the Jewish community in South Florida, I would say judge me and Andrew Gillum by our life, by our example, how we’ve lived and don’t allow the other side to twist and weaponize fear,” King said.

Wasserman Schultz, the first Jewish woman elected to Congress from Florida, said if Democrats don’t push back against what she called “the divisive, untrue, disgusting innuendo and overt criticism that the Republican Party is unfairly and wrongly hurling at Andrew Gillum,” the allegations could stick.

Ira Sabin, a former chairman of the Palm Beach County Republican Party who is chairman of South County Jewish outreach for DeSantis, said his side is making some inroads.

“We’ve got a lot of Jewish voters who are very apprehensive about [Gillum’s] stance on Jewish issues,” he said. “We know Ron’s stance when it comes to Israel and the support of the Jewish state and the support of the Jewish community.”

Israel

Both candidates have sought to play up their pro-Israel credentials.

In May, DeSantis traveled to Israel for the opening of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem, which was moved there from Tel Aviv by President Donald Trump, in a controversial foreign policy decision. At the Century Pines Jewish Center, Gillum told the audience that he’s traveled to Israel three times.

Sheskin said many people incorrectly assume that more pro-Israel stands from candidates automatically translates into more support from Jewish voters. Unless a candidate is seen as showing outright hostility toward Israel, policy nuances are “not the thing that’s going to make or break in deciding who Jews are going to vote for,” Sheskin said.

A 2016 poll of Florida Jewish voters conducted by GBA Strategies found that Israel ranked ninth out of 13 potential issues. The economy, ISIS and terrorism and the Supreme Court were at the top of the list.